Blog Posts

Thoughts on China and Japan

December 24, 2024

I just got back from vacation. This trip was my 2nd time in China, and my 1st time in Japan. Being in China feels like being in the future, while being in Japan seems like being in the past. That’s not to say that either of them are good or bad necessarily, just way more different than I’d expected. I’d somehow expected Japan to feel futuristic, but it was the exact opposite of that. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the things that felt really odd about Japan. In Japan, there are almost no public…

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I Custom Ordered a New Porsche 911 Targa.

September 4, 2024

cars

Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the Porsche 911 Targa. It’s an iconic design: I had posters of this thing on my wall all throughout high school and college. The right color was always Guards Red with a black roll bar and black wheels. That right there, so 1980s. 5 years ago, I fulfilled that childhood dream when I bought a new 2019 Targa off the showroom floor. Porsche of Downtown LA had done a really cool job speccing that car: chalk paint and all black accents. A couple years later during the COVID car price boom, nearly-new cars…

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Present to Succeed Conference Notes #pts24

June 14, 2024

presenting

Today I went to the Present to Succeed conference in Sofia, Bulgaria along with 850 other in-person attendees and a couple thousand live online attendees. I was excited because it’s not the kind of conference I usually attend – but I should, given that I do online training for a living. (I taught a session on doing good technical demos, too, which was fun.) Before the conference, I really enjoyed meeting the other presenters, hearing what they do for a living, and hearing how they do it. I had no idea there were so many agencies devoted to helping companies…

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Wanna Lose Weight? Me Too.

May 27, 2024

have you lost weight, ozempic, wegovy

For the longest time, my weight varied between 185 in the best of times to 205 in the less-best-of-times. In 2020, things got worse – and I’m guessing they got worse for you too. I gradually threw out my L t-shirts, and standardized on XLs for new ones. Last year, I started realizing that even my XL shirts were tight, and I gritted my teeth and started buying XXL t-shirts instead. The final straw was our recent trip to Hong Kong and Shanghai, when my luggage was delayed. I had to go shopping for t-shirts to get by, and stores…

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Graffiti Paint Job on My 356

May 23, 2024

cars, porsche

Last night, Doctor Ziso painted my 1964 Porsche 356 SC: To the purists screaming at their screen, relax, there’s precedence for this: Janis Joplin custom painted her SC too. Anyhoo, lemme explain how we got to this point. About a year ago, I bought this 1964 Porsche 356 SC from a man in the San Francisco area. His wife had owned it since the 1970s, daily drove it just like any other car, and put about 145K miles on it. In the 1990s, she bought a convertible, parked this SC in the garage, and … never drove it again. It…

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Introducing Myself to My Peers

May 11, 2024

marketing

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Teachable.com, the platform I use for online training sales, has an annual meetup for their top sellers where we get together and share techniques. This year, each attendee is giving a 5-minute intro talk about what we do and our biggest tip, so I recorded mine when I rehearsed it, and I’m sharing it here just for posterity: I would assume most regular visitors here on my personal site already know what I do, but if you’re new around here, welcome! Here are a few of my favorite resources on the topic of inbound marketing: The Basics of Personal Branding…

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Big American land yacht. Super comfy, great for cruising to dinner or weekend road trips to LA.

Bought a 1992 Cadillac Brougham.

April 13, 2024

cadillac, cars

Last year, I bought a 1983 Caddy, and I loved it. Unfortunately, that model year had one of the worst engines ever made, the infamous HT4100. Many of them are okay – but some of them are not, like mine. After a couple months of ownership, we figured out that it couldn’t handle the heat of stop-and-go Las Vegas Strip traffic in the summer. I looked into replacing the engine with a stronger one, but it’d easily exceed $20K, which isn’t sensible. I sold that car, but I had a Caddy-shaped hole in my heart. A very big hole. I…

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How the Company-Startup Thing Worked Out For Me, Year 12

April 2, 2024

Brent Ozar Unlimited, business

Every year, I post a retrospective about what it’s been like to start up a company. If you want to catch up, check out past posts in the Brent Ozar Unlimited tag. When we left off in the Year 11 post, I had gone through a ton of dramatic changes: divorce, moving to the US then to Mexico then to Vegas, and started grinding through my last year of live training classes, aiming to finish in October 2022. This post covers year 12 of the company, and I’m actually gonna stretch the dates out a little: May 2022 to December…

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Sold the Ferrari 328 and VW Type 3.

March 4, 2024

cars

I bought the 1971 VW Type 3 Squareback off Facebook Marketplace. I wanted a Porsche-ish car that I could take to cars & coffee events during the winter, while the Speedster replica was in the dining room. The VW had been abandoned in Vegas about 20 years ago with a bum engine, and the buyer put in a Porsche 914 engine and transmission. The VW was offered for sale in LA, so I flew over to take a look, and I was sold as soon as I saw the paint job. It’s so much better than it looks in pictures.…

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My Porsche 356 Lives Again

January 6, 2024

cars, porsche

Almost a year ago, I bought a 1964 Porsche 356 SC that had been hidden away in a garage for a couple of decades. The mechanical work is finally done, and it got delivered back home this week: I took it to Gaudin Classic Porsche (Instagram), a phenomenal shop here in Vegas that does beautiful work. Because the car had sat for decades with no prep work ahead of time, there were a few parts that had to be replaced, period. The tires, shocks, and brakes had to be redone. The fuel tank had quite a bit of rust inside…

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Hi. I’m Brent.